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<Paper uid="C04-1001">
  <Title>Grammar Modularity and its Impact on Grammar Documentation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Research in the field of grammar development focuses on grammar modularization, ambiguity management, robustness, testing and evaluation, maintainability and reusability. A point which has often been neglected is the detailed documentation of large-scale grammars--despite the fact that thorough documentation of the grammar code is a pre-requisite for code maintainability and reusability.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper, we argue that documenting large-scale grammars is a complex task that requires special, grammar-specific documentation techniques.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The line of reasoning goes as follows. We show that maintainability (and, hence, reusability) of a grammar depends to a large extent on the modularization of the grammar rules: a large-scale grammar remains maintainable only if linguistic generalizations are encoded explicitly, i.e., by modules (sec. 3.1). However, in contrast to modules in ordinary software programs, (certain) grammar modules cannot be black boxes (sec. 3.2). This property puts special constraints on the form of grammar documentation (sec. 4). Finally, we present an XML-based documentation technique that allows us to accomodate these constraints (sec. 5).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  2003), which I wrote at the IMS Stuttgart. I am very grateful to Anette Frank for invaluable discussions of the dissertation. Many thanks go to Bryan Jurish and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the paper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> To illustrate the needs of documentation, we refer to a German LFG toy grammar (Lexical-Functional Grammar, cf. sec. 2). Our argumentation, however, applies not only to grammars in the LFG formalism but to any grammar that is modularized to a certain extent.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>